In Spite of Us: Love
by ericajanebarry
Summary: Of mornings and marriage. *NSFW*


**A/N: I'm writing quite a few things at the moment, but this one came together (oh Lord, I'm blushing) most easily. I'm nervous. I know there are those who think that smut that doesn't advance a plotline is trash. I want to propose an alternate theory. Speaking as someone who will be married 18 years in a couple of weeks, I can say with authority that sex is unifying, and that is what marriage is about after all: oneness. So I'm not going to apologize for writing this, as we are so often wont to do. If you need for there to be a point, see it as a celebration of all that is good about marriage, mature love, and intimacy. Thanks go out to revfrog and newenglandgirl who helped me out of a jam. I probably didn't handle the thing the way either of you would, but I hope I stayed in the wheelhouse.**

**xx,  
~ejb~**

* * *

"'Morning." It's a hoarse kind of whisper. Husky, as she blinks her eyes open to find him watching her.

"Beauty." He acknowledges her. A noun that has become a nickname, more her own name, she thinks, than _Isobel _has been in a long time. He smiles, blinking heavily, a peculiar look in his eyes.

"What is it?" she asks. Her head is thick and muzzy. If speech is an effort, thought is a task insurmountable. _Bugger thought. _Then it dawns on her. That look, what it means. "You want me."

It mystifies her. What could she possibly have done, in sleep, to be met with the force of his longing immediately upon awakening? Not that she's complaining. It's the best kind of problem to have.

"Yes," he affirms, watching her eyes, reading her mind. It rumbles through his chest. She feels it even in the mattress. It makes her _ache._ "But we don't have to. You're just waking up …" It's absolutely unnecessary for him to say. And it's perfect. So very _Richard._

Rolling towards him, she kisses his mouth. Smiles against it. "As if I'd have it any other way." He can feel the words, taste them leaving her lips.

Grinning, he arches an eyebrow. "I happen to know you like it _lots _of other ways …" Drawing out the final _'s,' _snickering because _he's got her _and she can't refute it.

Abruptly she opens her mouth; shuts it with a furrow of her brow; opens it again.

He chuckles.

"I'm not going to dignify that with a response," she tells him. She looks huffy, her jaw set, nose in the air as she slides out of bed.

_All legs. _

His belly tightens, watching her move. The U of E t-shirt of his that she appropriated long ago rides up at the hem, treating him to a flash of her knickers. Of the perfect slim roundness of her buttocks. "Where are you going?" It comes out as a kind of snarl, and he winces internally.

Evidently she doesn't hear it that way, by the light in her eyes when she turns back at the doorpost to look at him. "Just running to the loo before … So there's no …" Big dark eyes blink at him. She is at once starkly forthright and bashful.

Surprised and pleased, he nods. "Right-o, go on then!"

"Ha!" she exclaims, flash of a smile before disappearing round the corner.

He's so glad she found the courage to tell him. She is staggeringly responsive, but sometimes she just can't … _get there, _and it was throwing her off her game.

She catches her breath in the bathroom. Mercy, but he has a way with her, and she's quite hot and bothered already. _Right, concentrate. _Bit of a hardship to relax when everything in her is tightening in response to him. She reaches to turn the tap for the basin. _Running water … waterfall … a brook … a downfall. _Her bladder releases. _Oh, thank God. That's better. _

She puzzles for a moment. Doctors of obstetrics and gynaecology, both of them, and yet she had stumbled all over herself screwing up the nerve to tell him, "When we're making love and I don't … _come_ … I can't, you see, if I have to … if I need to pee at all."

She doesn't understand what made saying the words so difficult. She hasn't got any airs and graces, and he's spent more time beside her elbow-deep in amniotic fluid than fresh and fair and ladylike. At any rate, it's behind her now, thankfully, and he was wonderful about it.

She returns to find him lying on his back, his eyes closed. One hand is balled into a fist atop the covers, while the other hovers near the join of his hip and thigh. She can see the ridge of his erection standing in sharp relief against the fabric of his shorts. Was he?— _Oh, my._ Regardless, the suggestion that he might have been pulls hard at the knot in her belly.

She tries for a nonchalant greeting but it comes out all wrong, like a squeak. Highly uncouth. "Hi."

His eyes open lazily, blinking her into focus. Flushed cheeks, arched brows. She's flustered, and it becomes her.

"Did you … umm …" She inclines her head towards his groin, jerks her chin, "… start without me?" _What am I saying? _

His eyes meet hers, limpid blue. His answer is noncommittal, a tease. "S'better when it's you. C'mere."

It's a fight, for her, not to visibly melt in response. He is so spare with words, so deliberate in the ones he chooses. She lies down beside him. Warm bed, warmer skin. She hadn't even realised that hers had taken on a chill, but when he winds a leg around her own, when she snuggles into his chest, the contrast is startling. She fails at holding back a moan.

"Isobel." Heat in his voice. Heat of his palms at her waist, rucking up the hem of her nightshirt.

Gooseflesh rising, icy hot wonderful shivers as his fingertips meet her skin. "Mm-hmm." Tipping her face up, catching him staring at her lips. They're just a man and a woman feeling things that billions of people have felt before them, so why is it so magical? So pressing, urgent, all-consuming?

His lips touch hers, and who cares about anybody else? Her world; his world, is he and she. Love was created for them, by them. There is no one else.

"Mmmm." She moans again, a joyous little giggle at the end of it. "Love you." She kisses him now. A teasing nip, a flick of her tongue, her lips parting, drawing him in.

Kissing. Endless, unhurried, sensual. He tugs at her nightshirt until she pulls it over her head, lifts her by the hips so she lies atop him. Her hands cradle his face. The rasp of a day's growth under her fingertips sings along her nerve endings from head to toe.

His hands are everywhere: smoothing along the length of her arms, gliding over her back. Palming her buttocks, easing the tips of his fingers under the edges of her knickers. Teasing her outer lips.

"Mmmm," she sighs, "that's _good."_

"Yeah, beauty?" He scrapes the edge of his fingernail across her clitoris, through the thin slippery material of her knickers. "These have got to go."

She rises up on her knees, still and breath-caught as he works them down her thighs. She treats him to the cold slip of them sliding against his calves before kicking them to the floor. He reaches out, grasps her hips. Pulls her back to him. Her legs spread, moving to the outsides of his, and she turns her head into the crook of his neck. Delightful contrast against her lips: the silken soft skin sprinkled with overnight stubble.

If the feel of her doesn't kill him, her full, sultry voice surely will. The way his heart, his body responds to her half-whispered cry of, "Darling! Oh … oh!" as he strokes her, now bare. He shivers, his scrotum heavy and throbbing. His wife_, _soft and undone in his arms. His _wife,_ who could just as easily not have been. Whom he loved quietly (though hardly from a distance) for years, and convinced himself that her company was enough.

He hugs her body against him tightly, using the leverage to roll her onto her side. She is quick to avail herself of the expanses of skin presented to her, drawing her thumb and forefinger down his throat, over the hollow between his collarbones. She traces the separation between the rise of his pectorals, coarse curls running through her fingers. Presses her palms against his chest, his heart thumping beneath her right hand. She raises up to nip at his Adam's apple with the sharp edges of her teeth, to lick his nipples _("__**Christ, **__Isobel!"), _to smile against his wildly pounding heart and rest her lips there. Her most favourite part of him, the very most sacred.

The _life _that courses through his veins is her fixation. Whatever he wants from her is his for the taking (she tells him so and he groans in answer and rolls his hips against her with his hands at the small of her back, pressing her closer), but she has needs of her own.

She trails her index finger over the waistband of his shorts, and whilst there's no misunderstanding her intent, she spells it out nonetheless. "I want to touch you, darling."

"As if there's a chance I'd refuse." He grins and it makes her heart lurch. He lifts his hips, holds his breath as she pulls his shorts down his legs and deposits them on the floor.

"Alright?" gently spoken; her palm softly grazing his length as it lies against his belly.

"Mmm … _yes."_

She smiles, thrilling inside at the knowledge that _he sounds like that because of her. _Knelt between his legs, she moves forward on her knees, smoothing her palms along his inner thighs from knees to groin. She watches his face, the rise and fall of his chest. Her fingertips follow the creases where his thighs and hips meet. Touching in reverent fascination, because she treasures his physical form for its own beauty and not simply because he makes her feel so good.

His eyes drift shut as he wrestles to find the balance between savouring her touch and losing control. Her lips brush his sternum; she sucks at his skin. She is _tasting_ him, and it's—

Never in any of his dreams of loving this woman did the concept that she would _enjoy_ his body factor in. His many years alone wrought their damage in that he has difficulty seeing himself as capable of being someone's first choice, their only desire. She is healing him, little by little. As her tongue dips into his belly button; as her breasts graze his chest, he is learning how very much she means it: she has bought wholesale into this life with him. Far more than simply the woman he loves, she is the woman _who loves him. _

Absolute love. She feels it as her fingertips glance over the trembling muscles of his lower abdomen. His body beautiful, even with its battle scars, and breathless in anticipation of her caress. She flattens her palms at the base of his penis, the pads of her thumbs moving over his testicles, between, then sweeping beneath them. Pressing the fingertips of one hand hard into the flesh there as she encircles his length with the other. Gentle strokes, taking her own pleasure. Upwards over the hard ridge that runs along the underside, that fits so perfectly against the deep place within her where she aches for him. Running the edge of her thumb around the head, rubbing hard against the dimple on the flared underside.

God_damn, _she's good! It's beautiful, what she's doing, but all he can say are obscene things, profane things, because the language doesn't exist that would describe the way she makes him feel. He bites it back, tries to hold it in as her fingertips find a spot that brings sensations he's —Holy _shit!— _never felt before. She is sweetness, so elegant, and she deserves better—

"Yes, my love, let me hear you. Does it feel good?" Her breath hot, _just there, _granting him permission. And then her lips descend, pressing soft sucking kisses from base to tip.

He grips the sheets hard in his fists (he is not _that _sort of man; he will _not _grab her head, force her mouth in any way) and lets go a stream of curses that leave her blushing, grinning; a stark reminder that her husband is a Lowlands lad through and through.

The feel of him in her hands: hard and soft, rough and silken, perfectly imperfect and _real _and _hers. _She could touch him forever this way, make him feel her love. His cries and his heat have got her head swimming deliriously, everything swollen and heavy and she _waaaaants him. _

Gradually she lets him go, moves her body against his. Spreads her legs over his own so that his sex touches hers. Rests there, reaching for his hands. For long moments they sit watching the other's eyes, aching.

"How'd you know," he asks, panting for breath as he leans his forehead against hers, "to stop before I …?"

She smooths his cheek, smiling softly. "I know you," is all she says.

She certainly does. They have no secrets. She knows each look, every turn of phrase in Richardspeak and all of their meanings. His lonely past; his failures. His strengths; what makes him glad, his heart soar.

"And I know you," he answers, truth for truth. "And you _need."_ His eyes look into her soul and she couldn't hide it if she tried. Not that she wants to. "Come into my arms; let me hold you."

He moves back against the headboard of their bed, plumping pillows behind him. It's a wonder that he _can _move at all right now; she isn't the only one who needs. _Soon, _he thinks. _Soon, but first …_

She moves to sit between his knees, her back against his chest. His hands rest on her shoulders. Warm, and then moving, knuckles finding the knots at the base of her skull, kneading them smooth. "That good, beauty?"

She drops her chin to her chest, groaning in relief. "Wonderful. Didn't realise I needed it." She looks back at him over her shoulder. "Trust you to know."

Her words warm him straight through to the centre of his heart. It's all he's ever wanted. To know her beautiful body, her brilliant mind and brave heart.

His lips brush the curve of her neck. "I love you so much." He chokes a little, fighting a tide of emotions. They were —the both of them— broken, so alone. So fearful of risking their friendship for love lest the other one not feel the same. It's silly, really, the time they wasted being cautious, when the transition from friends to lovers was so seamless and organic.

She has changed him, is changing him. He is less quick to judge now, and learning that intuition isn't rubbish_. _He talks to her, tells her everything. Wants to be known, even in the less-than-savoury details. The speed at which he was wont to run to the bottle as a younger man. The memories of war that plague him; his American brother-in-arms dying as he held him. His anger, bordering on the murderous, at Robert Crawley for letting sweet Sybil die. No secrets. Nothing held back. _Take me as I am. _

"You feel so good and I love you." He says it again, his tongue tracing the shell of her ear as his hands slowly slip from her shoulders to her breasts. He holds them tenderly, warm flesh in warm palms.

"_Ohhhhh." _Her head lolls back, rests on his shoulder. She can feel him twitch against her back. His thumb brushes her nipple and she can't be certain it wasn't by accident, but her reaction guarantees that when it happens again it is most definitely intentional.

She feels so … loose. Free. It is still such a strange feeling to think of herself as a sexual being, but it's a wonderful kind of strange. In the years after losing Reginald, it was the thing she never could stop berating herself for: missing his hands on her body, the deep press of him inside her. On the other hand, missing his love for her, his companionship, how they were together; while those memories hurt, and she'd have moved heaven and earth for one last opportunity to tell him she loved him, they were _normal. _Things one is supposed to feel when grieving the love of one's life lost. It wasn't until her romance with Richard had been underway for several months that she was able to talk to about it, twenty years after the fact.

He is healing her. Their romantic pasts are far more similar than they are different. He, too, lost a great love at a young age, and he understood. Was willing to go there. To talk about the thing bereavement counselling won't touch, and to _listen._

She is as free again as she was in her twenties. Free to want him, and to take what she wants. Free to touch him and to long for his touch. Free to savour his weight upon her, to enjoy being taken hard and softly seduced. To wake him in the middle of the night because she needs him. Free from guilt because she'll always love Reggie, but he's not here. Richard _is_, and Richard would have been content to do nothing more than hold her forever if that's what she'd needed.

He strokes her nipples and jolts her back to the present. Held between his first two fingers, pressing and circling with the pads of his thumbs. How fortunate is she that he loves doing this as much as she loves him doing it for her.

It's the tiny, broken whispers, nearly inaudible, that drive him mad. It's mostly nonsensical, but sometimes he catches bits of things that sound like words. _Richard _features frequently, and he never really felt one way or another about his name, but he's come to love it since she's been his. _I love you, _which she has no trouble telling him, even when she's furious. But the secret endearments are his favourites. Ones she loves hearing, that turn her to putty in his hands, but that she shies away from employing with him. Except in these moments, her skin flushed warm with wanting, his hands coaxing _honey _from her lips. _Baby. _And the directives, so colourful as to turn the air blue, that she'd never dream of uttering in any other circumstance.

"How does it feel, my darling?" he murmurs, nibbling her earlobe. Tender flesh between his teeth and he tugs gently.

A wailing sound, peculiar to her ears, that startles her when she recognises it as her own voice. Then breathy again. "Richa_aahh_ … babe, I …"

"Yeah," he replies, like she's said something absolutely brilliant. "Beautiful, Isobel."

"Mmm, sweetheart, don't stop." She is that glorious kind of lax now that is also tense, tightening. Open in his arms, her legs open. Wanton, only for him.

He lets one hand drift down her belly, through the neat patch of curls. He palms her sex and holds her there firmly, her breath caught. Then his fingers are spreading her lips. She's thick and damp and his belly coils tight. It's his turn to touch for the sheer enjoyment of it. Circling, feather-light, tracing the shape of her lips, first outer, then away. Over the join of thigh and groin, treasuring her gasp as the muscles retract. Then back again, firmer pressure on her inner lips, light again as the very tip of his forefinger circles her opening.

"Oh, honey … _hurts _… s'good." Fainter, the murmurs, the more lost she gets. She's _killing_ him slowly with the filthy-innocent whispers, but what a way to go. He's holding her tightly, and her breaths are quick and stuttering against his hand pressed to her diaphragm, and then, because turnabout is fair play —and because pushing her out of her comfort zone is his _duty _as her husband— he lifts her hand from where it rests on his knee and brings it (palm down, his fingers woven through her own) between her legs.

"Together, yeah?" he asks when she turns her face up in silent enquiry.

He's only ever coaxed it out of her _once, _an admission that she does this —_did _it, she hastened to amend, after Reginald and before _him. _

Even if he didn't know better (she's a lousy liar, with tells he will never divulge), the ease with which she does it when she's this far gone and the speed with which she brings herself to the edge give her away.

He isn't jealous; oh, no. Much to the contrary. Just once, he'd like to catch her in the midst of it, coerce her into letting him watch. But in the meantime …

"Talk to me," she asks, her great, dark eyes on his. "Do this with me."

"Of course, love. Gentle, yeah? The way you like it?"

"Mmm," she affirms. Not quite a grunt, because she's too much a lady, but the bare minimum of acknowledgment. _Talk to me _doesn't mean _she_ wants to talk. It's hard for her, and yes, she recognises the irony. She won't defend herself; it's a holdover from having been too long alone.

And because he loves her, he's not going to let her off the hook. She barely touches herself, light flicks of her fingertips concentrated in one tiny area whilst he presses the pads of his fingers into the depressions on either side of her clitoris. "What do you think of when you're like this?" he asks, sotto voce.

_Dammit, _he's relentless. He _knows _how the low rasp of his voice weakens her. Her hips jerk unbidden at the sound. "Arsehole," she swears through gritted teeth, and then they both laugh. "Alright, d'you really want to know?" She already knows how he would answer and doesn't wait. "I think about your mouth. On me. _Here." _Grabbing hold of his hand, she presses his fingertips where her own had just been. She heaves a breath; saying it aloud is terrifying and exhilarating.

_Oh. My GOD. _He is so hard he's in agony. She said it! He takes over for her a moment. Glancing, downward-only strokes, and his delight when she doesn't remove her own hand, but caresses her inner thigh instead. He's tempted to keep pushing, get her to tell him more, because her _voice. _But she's building now. She doesn't do the brutal, faster, harder macerating of her flesh that men are inclined to do to women, but he can tell by the upward straining of her hips, the broken rhythm of her breathing.

"Close, baby," he observes, and she nods. "What do you need?"

She shakes her head. "Just you. Just … more." Beautiful, broken, lust-laden and unintelligible. He will always think of this moment now, when he longs for her.

He employs both hands now, pushing inside, up. Sliding slick into her, tight and tightening still. And tugging lightly on her clitoris, her thumb and forefinger encircling his wrist. _Yes. THAT. _

Closer still, and she's trying to breathe, to push against everything that wants to constrict. Hold out for as long as possible, until doing so causes actual pain. And then tears in the corners of her eyes, and crying out to him, as if there's anything he can do now.

But there _is,_ and he does. Firm pressure inside her. Firm, but still, now, and outside, the same. Hard press of his fingers against her labia as she climaxes, the force of it shaking her whole body. Steady and still even though it's nearly killing him, the way she's squeezing his fingers, and a good job he isn't inside of her yet or it would be all over, already.

When he can extract himself from her momentarily, he lays her down and then gathers his body around hers, stroking her heated skin. He rolls his hips against her bum, dancing fingertips across her flank, whispering into her ear as she gathers her strength.

She brings his hand to her breast and covers it with her own, and she's ready for him. She turns over her shoulder, pink-cheeked and wide-eyed. "Can we? Like this?"

Orgasm has stolen her typical eloquence and _she's so beautiful how can she be his? _Together they guide him inside her and his palm presses her hips back at the same time he cants forward. Her spine curves in a deep arch.

He's never before known a woman who wants harder and deeper_ after_ she comes, and he thinks it borders on the miraculous. He's so deep and she's slick-swollen-tight and it's so painful-good they're stunned into near silence. She feels him so much they're nearly the same person now. He snaps his hips forward and she reaches back to hold him and there's the rhythm.

"Yeah," he says, and cries out on the next thrust because it's good and it's _her _and it's real.

"Oh, that's so—" she keens, high and sharp. Tight, like the fit of them. "Yeah," she echoes his appraisal. "Come on, let me feel you."

_Christ, _it's the closest she's come to audible filth and he's barely holding on now. It's still slow and short-sharp-deep, and then hard _hard_ when her fingertips dig insistently into the flesh of his arse.

He reaches a hand between their legs again, just to touch her a little more, and she joins in. Touches him where he moves in and out of her. He comes with her name on his lips.

He knows that afterwards feels like a microcosm of grief for her, so he is gentle, pressing his hand against her sex as he begins to withdraw.

"Okay, easy. Easy," she gasps, high and tight. Emptiness where she was so, so full. A tiny dry sob sticks in her throat.

"I'm sorry, darling. Come and lie down on me."

_Oh,_ she loves him. It's the perfect thing to say.

She retrieves her (his) shirt from the floor first. "Open for me," she tells him, a gentle hand on each knee. He is overly sensitive now, but his eyes drift shut in a show of implicit trust and she wipes away the traces of them with such tenderness it nearly makes him weep. _This _is making love, just as much as when he's bollocks-deep inside her.

When she is through he uses her position to his advantage. Taking the shirt from her, he holds it between her legs with one hand as he pushes his nose through her curls and kisses her clitoris softly. And when he brings her body down upon his own and kisses her, she tastes _them _on his lips.

She settles into him and he pushes his thigh between her legs, gentle steady pressure where she still feels sparks. Sleep is closing in now, heavy-lidded and leaden-limbed.

He chuckles softly and it rumbles through his chest and into hers. "We've destroyed this bed," he thinks aloud.

"Change the sheets later," she murmurs, most of her words getting lost against his skin. She lifts her head a moment to look him in the eyes. "Or not."

He traces the edges of her shoulder blades idly. "That your dirty little secret, hmm? You like sleeping in our ruined sheets?"

"I do," she tells him unequivocally. "I love the smell of you on my skin."

He smooths her sweat-damp hair, kissing her deeply. Already he's picturing them in the bath later on. Washing her clean so that he can defile her again. Several minutes pass in silence and he thinks by her even, deep breaths that she's fallen asleep, but then she whispers,

"The real secret is us, though. We weren't supposed to happen. And yet, in spite of us: love."

He presses a kiss into her hair. "That'd be a smashing epitaph, wouldn't it?"

She raises her head one last time to smile at him, then kisses the centre of his chest. "Sleep now. I'll be wanting more of this later."

"Yes, guv," he teases, then: "Oi. I love you."

She nips at his bottom lip. "I love _you,_ Major."


End file.
